Danger Zone Friends & Other News

Announcing: Danger Zone Friends!

This is older news for those of you who follow me on Twitter, but for the rest of you, I am pleased to announce my next game... Danger Zone Friends! It's a JRPG about a turtle and a pantsless otter who make a grocery run for shredded cheese, but take a wrong turn into the DANGER ZONE. As our heroes attempt an escape from this strange and dangerous land, rumors spread of the return of an ancient evil, the Dairy Demon, Cheelzebub...

Spoiler alert - it is.

This is, undoubtedly, my greatest game to date, featuring some of the best encounter design, art, storytelling, comedy, and music I've ever produced. 3-6 hours of playtime, 20 minutes of original music, over 25 enemy types, so on and so forth. It's been an undertaking.

This game was originally made for my girlfriend, who asked for a "cute game" for her birthday with animal characters. She plays a fair amount of Persona and Pokemon, so I thought she would appreciate a *cough* short JRPG. As a supposedly casual project, it seemed like a good excuse to dust off the copy of RPG Maker VX Ace I got in a humble bundle a while back, and just have fun making something without having to code original mechanics from scratch. Many of my favorite RPGs of all time - Off, Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle, and Space Funeral - were vanilla RPG Maker games created without a lick of original code. It felt like a rite of passage to produce my own RPG within the (very limiting) constraints of the tool.  A lot of folks question the legitimacy of RPG Maker as a development suite, and while I know it was the right tool for the job, I still feel self-conscious about using it. At the end of the day, though, you can't argue with the results.

Despite my aspirations for this to be a tiny, casual, and sloppy game, it quickly turned into a serious endeavor. It became clear, after I had drawn, written, and programmed the initial cutscene that I was onto something special. I started development in June, missed my girlfriend's July birthday deadline, and continued to work for the following three months, pushing myself to push myself as an artist, composer, and writer.

As this game was made for my girlfriend, it includes a number of elements - inside jokes and scenarios - that will only truly be understood by the two of us, making this the most personal, expressive, heartfelt game I've made, strangely enough. However, the game should be just as enjoyable for the rest of you. Remove the insider knowledge, and what remains is an unusual story filled with non-sequitur humor.

But if you didn't know that about Astrodon Johnstoni, that's okay.

The combat is mostly what you'd expect from an RPG Maker game, building upon the default turn-based battle system. What sets Danger Zone Friends apart from other RPGs is the increased importance of non-damaging support skills, namely, abilities that cause buffs, debuffs, status effects, healing, and MP manipulation. Out of the three characters in your party, only one of them is any good at dealing raw damage. The game places more emphasis on providing adequate support and changing the flow of battle. As a result, battles are slowly paced, thoughtful affairs.

Despite having the same core battle system as nearly every other RPG Maker game, I attempt to make combat in Danger Zone Friends deeper than in other games in its genre.

All in all, the game's loaded with jokes, cool monsters, and a rockin' soundtrack. Currently, my girlfriend is about 80% through her playthrough. As soon as she's done, I'll start preparing it for general release. I'm also going to wait until a lot of the hype around (the admittedly fantastic) Deltarune starts to die down - it shares a lot of tonal similarities with Danger Zone Friends, and there's no use in competing with it.

Anyway, the most important thing is, I love Danger Zone Friends, and I hope you will too!

Updates to Monster Truck Power Fantasy and Bloodjak!

In other news, both Monster Truck Power Fantasy and Bloodjak have gotten patched! There's minor bug fixes with both, but the largest changes are that Monster Truck Power Fantasy now has a subtitle option, and Bloodjak now runs at a constant speed, regardless of its framerate. These were mostly made to address technical issues when showcasing the games live, but for those of you who are hard of hearing, hopefully the subtitles allow for you to better enjoy Power Fantasy.

Baltimore Game Collective: Now Featuring John D. Moore!

Tomorrow night, Stephen and I from Baltimore Game Collective will be showcasing our collection of work at Colorspace Labs' First Friday Indie Arcade in Philadelphia! What's new this time around is that we'll also be showcasing some games by our newest member, John D. Moore. John is a prolific developer whose diverse creative output spans over two decades. We'll be featuring three games of his this time around: Monster Hug, Dr. Creepinscare's Pumpkin Patch Match, and Ungrateful Birds. Happy to have you on board, John!

That's all for now. Please stay tuned for the release of Danger Zone Friends later this month.

Patching of Games and the Implications

A friend brought it to my attention that Monster Truck Power Fantasy, among other Game Maker: Studio games I've made, would display a black screen on his computer running Windows 10. This appears to be a rare bug, but it's one I've since fixed. Monster Truck Power Fantasy, Gewgawlicious, Bloodjak, and Digital Toilet World should now run on Windows 10 with no problem.

The Morphine Western Revenge already had the fix applied, most people shouldn't download and play Darcy's Yurt Adventure, and Empty Chambers and How to Fly were made in Game Maker 8, so I ain't touching those anymore. Everything else was made in Unity or Twine. 

I know I'm late to the conversation about the permanence of software as a medium, but I'm becoming increasingly aware of just how fragile it is. Text can always be transcribed and preserved in a dozen different ways. Music and film can always be digitized to a playable format indefinitely. I'm starting to come to the realization that my games may no longer be playable on Windows, maybe not even ten or twenty years from now, and there isn't much I can do about it.

This particular black screen bug, from what I've read, was caused by the Windows 10 Creators Update, and it affects fullscreen Game Maker: Studio games indiscriminately. There's a simple fix that can be performed from within the program. So far, so good. It took an evening for me to go through nearly every game to perform the fix and re-upload it, but it's worth it to make sure that my games can run, let alone run well.

The scary thing, though, is that Game Maker: Studio is no longer supported by the developer, as it has been replaced by Game Maker: Studio 2. GM:S, in its final version, was capable of circumventing the bug. I certainly can't count on that being the case in the future, or on Game Maker: Studio properly running in the future.

So, it's possible to port all of my games into the new program. From what I hear, this requires the games to be reprogrammed, to an extent. I've made six Game Maker: Studio games so far, and it would take some serious time and effort to port them in Game Maker Studio 2 to make sure everything continues to work on current software and hardware. Not to mention, every time I have to make a change to fix a bug across all of my games caused by, for example, a Windows update, I have to fix and re-upload all of my games.

I make about two or three games every year. Let's say Game Maker Studio 3 comes out in five years. By the, I would hopefully have at least 16 games that I would need to port into that program... the workload required to keep my work current will snowball over the decades.

Of course, who knows how long Game Maker will exist as a program in any iteration? Nothing lasts forever. Maybe the last version is released, say, fifteen, twenty years from now, the company goes bankrupt, and I lose the ability to make any changes to my games' source code?

Of course, you can run any outdated Windows program in compatibility mode, and it should run correctly. But whether it does or not depends entirely upon the competence of Microsoft engineers. The ability for anyone to play my games over the course of my lifetime is largely in their hands. Not to mention, it won't occur to the typical player to run a game in compatibility mode, or to run it through an emulator.

This is probably going to be a widespread problem as operating systems undergo countless iterations over the coming decades (get hyped for Windows 40), and I may be pleasantly surprised by the solutions the IT community develops, but in the meantime, it is unnerving.

Monster Truck Power Fantasy v1.1

I updated "Monster Truck Power Fantasy" to version 1.1. It is now downloadable from Gamejolt and Itch.

I fixed some bugs, adjusted the spawning patterns and scoring to be fairer to the player, and made some slight graphical and technical improvements.

Here's the complete change list. Cheers!

v1.1
Features:
-Tire damage dealt is now based on the percentage of tire integrity remaining.
-The minimum tire integrity is now 1.
-Tires deflate and wheels start sparking at a tire integrity of 34.
-The tire integrity bar now flashes red when tires deflate.
-New building textures added
-Score at end is now outlined in black.
-Rooftop fences no longer spawn in proximity of tire spikes.
-The spawn rate of sharp objects increases during last 30 seconds.
-The truck now shakes when hitting things.

Bug Fixes:
-Removed developer feature where truck height could be adjusted with the arrow keys (oops)
-The speed of game is now unaffected by frame rate.
-The truck now continues traveling in the correct direction after game ends.
-The game no longer immediately ends if you begin a run within a second of opening the game.

Monster Truck Power Fantasy

Here's a new game for ya kiddos: "Monster Truck Power Fantasy." I made it for the 2017 Sekret Santa game jam at Glorious Trainwrecks. My gift recipient asked for a game with a giant monster truck that destroys an entire city, among other things.

So, I made a game about a monster truck. I could describe it further by genre, but why should I? It's a video game about a goddamn monster truck.

I've always been enamored with the idea of music games in the style of James Earl Cox's You Don't Know the Half of It: Fins of the Father. So, I decided to write a song for the game with conventional structure and lyrics, as opposed to an instrumental loop. Imagine Jon Spencer, Sleater-Kinney, Shakey Graves, and the frontman from Arcade Fire getting together and making a baby. A song baby. This is that song.



I was given a month to work on the game, but due to the work on "The Giant Robot Blues," hospitalization, and holiday cheer, I've only had a week to make the game. Three of those days were dedicated to the music. This didn't leave much time for game design.

I'm pretty happy with the results, given the short development period, but a post-jam version with bug fixes is in the works.

You can download the game for Windows from Glorious Trainwrecks for the time being. Release on other platforms is impending. Thanks for playing!